‘American Masters’ Recalls Man Ray’s Invented Life

If you’re an admirer of the Surrealist art of American expatriate Man Ray (1890-1976), tonight’s installment of PBS’ “American Masters” offers a thorough, often engaging overview of the artist’s long life. Produced and directed by Mel Stuart, who first filmed a conversation with the artist almost 40 years ago, “Man Ray: Prophet of the Avant-Garde” was written by Man Ray biographer Neil Baldwin and is narrated by actress Stockard Channing.

The title-word “prophet” should probably be read to mean self-appointed spokesman more than one who predicts the future. Man Ray, who was born Emanuel Radnitsky and raised in Brooklyn, was not a major figure; but, his career speaks of an important modern phenomenon: Making art was for him a way to leave his conventional life behind and invent a new one.

His most famously disorienting Dada sculpture, “Le Cadeau (The Gift),” was composed from a row of sharp tacks glued onto the base of an ordinary flatiron, rendering it both useless and absurd. In a revealing interview he explains that, as an unknown member of the so-called Lost Generation newly arrived in 1920s Paris, he had come across the plain flatiron in a shop window and immediately thought, “Now there’s something invisible; maybe I can do something with that.”

It’s as if he were talking about himself. Transforming the innocuous and dull into something startling and inescapable was his M.O. as a Dadaist and Surrealist artist; it may also describe what this son of the great immigration influx into New York around the turn of the century desired most for his own life.

Captivated with painting, Man Ray worked his way through Cezanne, Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism--cutting-edge styles, pioneered by others. There’s some poignancy when he speaks wistfully of his allegiance to painting and his casual regard for photography, for it is as a photographer that he’s most widely remembered.

And rightly so. Although his large but derivative 1939 painting “Le Beau Temps,” recently seen in L.A. at Track 16 Gallery, gets over-praised, the program does a credible job with his photographs. They include beautiful portraits of Parisian art-world luminaries, inventive images of three of the four women in his life and invigorating experiments with camera-less pictures.

* The “American Masters” special “Man Ray: Prophet of the Avant-Garde” airs tonight at 9 on KCET-TV Channel 28.